Marcello Carlin and Lena Friesen review every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it

Tuesday, 28 July 2015

QUEEN: The Miracle

(#388: 3 June 1989, 1
week)

Track listing:
Party/Khashoggi’s Ship/The Miracle/I Want It All/The Invisible Man/Breakthru’/Rain
Must Fall/Scandal/My Baby Does Me/Was It All Worth It

(Author’s Note: The CD edition included three additional tracks: “Hang
On In There,” the Brian May instrumental “Chinese Torture” and the 12-inch mix
of “The Invisible Man.”
I used the cassette.)

I don’t remember seeing this album being mentioned, let
alone reviewed, in Melody Maker or NME, although it got four stars in Q magazine, which by 1989 was where all
the readers had gone. One might have thought there was really nothing to say
about it, and moreover that saying anything about it wouldn’t make any
difference. Rich middle-aged men who’d done it all and had nothing better to do
with their time, or the disguised thoughts of one man who knew that he was
running out of time?

For Queen fans, The
Miracle was a considerable improvement on A Kind Of Magic, although such judgements are always relative; the
group seem far more comfortable when the “rock” button gets pushed, even
briefly – the epileptic interlude in the title song, the final song’s summoning
up of past triumphs – than when they are trying to be Culture Club covering “Young
Hearts Run Free” (“Rain Must Fall”) or Prince doing “Mony, Mony” (“Party”) or George
Michael (“My Baby Does Me”) or Bomb The Bass (“The Invisible Man”). One would
have thought that by 1989 they had done enough to body-swerve the need to sound
hip. Nor am I convinced that they needed to do songs about hanging out on the
yacht of a dodgy arms dealer or moaning about the tabloid press.

From the cover in, they take great pains to remind the
listener that they are a group, not
just Freddie and backing band, and it is rather sweet to hear the band namechecks
on “The Invisible Man” although, like the Beatles’ “The End,” such devices tend
to indicate an imminent finality. The video for “Breakthru’” saw them
performing the song on top of a train, speeding through the Cambridgeshire
countryside; apparently making the video was a lot of fun for everyone
involved, and it may represent the last public instance of all four having an
uncomplicatedly good time.

But I note that in that song Freddie sings “Breakthru’ these
barriers of pain,” and although he gives a fine, lusty (if somewhat hoarse)
vocal performance throughout the album, there are nevertheless clues here and
there which suggest that everything is not great; the exhausted downward stress
he gives to the last three syllables of the line “Everybody was hung-over” in “Party,”
the defiant “Who said that my party was over?/Huh, huh, I’m in pretty good
shape” in “Khashoggi’s Ship,” “Incredible how you can see right through me” in “The
Invisible Man,” and, most poignantly, “I’m a man with a one-track mind/So much
to do in one lifetime” in “I Want It All.”

“I Want It All” was one of the group's last great rockers,
although with the benefit of hindsight can be viewed less as a Thatcherite
money-grabbing anthem and more as the desperate wish of someone who might only
have a limited amount of time to experience it all (hence “I want it now”). The title track is the most
poignant because of what Freddie doesn’t
sing, but what he might have been thinking as he wanders amazed at this
wonderful world and wanting it not to be destroyed; yes, Hendrix, Sunday
morning cups of tea and Sahara rain are, or were, all miraculous but wouldn’t
it be a greater miracle if there were…just…a cure?

The album essentially ends with “Was It All Worth It,” a
last-ditch attempt to recapture the old Sheer
Heart Attack power – although not their last album, The Miracle certainly plays as though it were some kind of final
statement – which features Freddie looking back on this rock ‘n’ roll life that
he has led. “Am I a happy man,” he asks rhetorically, “or is this sinking sand?”
– and, he implies, why does it have to be either/or? There is a trace of Mott the Hoople’s “Saturday
Gigs” about these recollections, and if the song’s title sounds anticipatory of
the Pet Shop Boys, “Being Boring,” which is about much the same thing, will
follow just over a year later. But if the curtain is coming down, Freddie asks
himself (for peace?) whether it was all worth the price that ultimately had to
be paid, and concludes, smirking: “It was a WORTHWHILE EXPERIENCE!” with a
Holly Johnson-esque guffaw. Roger Taylor’s gong reappears from “Bohemian
Rhapsody,” while halfway through Freddie barks “We love you MADLY!” (John
Deacon via Miles Davis/Duke Ellington?) The final conclusion appears to be: it’s
worth hanging on in there. For now.